-u nderground groups, each with three to
eight people-all over the island. Ours is a
fight that cannot be stopped. We will die, if
we must, for the freedom of our country."
"We are working very closely with Castro's
army," Nazario asserted. "Our people include
some highly placed officers. Now we are pre
paring a big action to move the country!"
Emilio removed the chair from the door
with a cheery, optimistic smile, and I left.
All Cubans in Miami share the hopes of
Alpha 66, but few are as optimistic. About
15 percent have become U. S. citizens, and
as the months and years of exile slip by, many
more will do so. Still there are some-partic
ularly among the elderly-who find it difficult
to adjust to life here.
When I stopped for gas at Johnny Fumero's
service station, his 75-year-old father filled
the tank and polished the windshield. "Are
you happy here in Miami?" I asked.
He would not go that far. "Tranquilo," he
conceded. For 41 years he had prospered as
a dentist in Cuba. Now it was probably too
late to undergo retraining and qualify to prac
tice his profession in the United States.
AndI suspect that some people, like Erasmo
Castro, have succumbed to creeping despair
and will never adjust at all. A balding man
with skin the color of polished walnut, he
spent most of his life as a fisherman on the
south coast of Cuba. When told he could no
longer sell his fish to whomever he pleased
that the state would buy it, or no one-he
balked, and set sail one night with seven
others. A tanker picked them up 11 days
later off the coast of Texas.
Today Erasmo shares a tiny apartment
near the Miami River and catches snapper,
grouper, and lobster off the Keys. He can
choose his buyer now, but it is not the same.
After a decade in Miami he still speaks no
English, though he can study it free at the
English Center, sponsored by the Cuban Ref
ugee Program, as thousands of others have
done. He shrugs a hopeless shrug.
"Al pescao no le importa la lengua," he said.
"To the fish, the language doesn't matter."
And melancholy flooded his voice: "Oh, I
know this is a good country. But it is yours,
not mine. When someone takes your country
away from you, you have lost everything."
Many suffer the same yearning for their
homeland, but none I spoke to would return
UUl uT FLI
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, nULrL, ULA
M.
,
.
Symbols of courage, boats that carried Cuban refugees to freedom
lie abandoned at the U. S. Coast Guard Base in Key West. More
than one such craft has been found bobbing empty after storms in
the Straits of Florida. Of the refugees who made it safely, many see
little chance of ever returning to Cuba. Eligible for U. S. citizenship
after five years, Cuban exiles (right) take the oath of allegiance at a
naturalization ceremony.